Russia's DO-Theatre, the company who brought us the legendary Hopeless Games, are back in town, and if this feather-light dance piece on the theme of flying, floating and crashing back down to land doesn't reach the heights (and lacks the originality) of that previous show, it is still a very playful piece of movement theatre.

It is common to describe Fringe shows as taking place in a cupboard. Well, Pandora 88 by Germany’s Fabrik company actually does. And makes a merit out of it.

Shrinking the available stage-space of cavernous St Stephens Church to a lift-shaft-sized Perspex box, dancer-actors Wolfgang Hoffman and Sven Till take us on a 60-minute journey through the human mind – with only a few metres of space between them. Apparently inspired by Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is an involving, touching and funny study of incarceration, both physical and mental.

They’ve been described as the Catalan Tap Dogs. Thankfully, the Camut Band are far less shiny and manufactured than that. Filed under music in the Fringe programme, but with far more glorious hoofing than half the acts masquerading under “dance”, this Barcelona-based tap/percussion troupe are longer in the tooth than many of their counterparts – and all the better for it. With a glimmer in their eye that says “been there, done it, enjoyed it”, these gleeful, gurning-faced, twinkle-toed male performers let rip.

DANGLING cocaine and cash like a carrot to a donkey, the wealthy Master keeps his beautiful young lover Roxanne glued to his side. Addicted to both, Roxanne dances dutifully before him, emulating the fillies in his stable with delicate trots. Both feed off each other, until a handsome young suitor enters the frame, plunging them into a tragic love triangle.

Actor Cathal Quinn’s brutish Master has us hooked from the start, setting the scene with a sneering monologue. The two lead dancers not only infuse Roxanne and her suitor with sexual chemistry, but demonstrate genuinely strong technique.

Two men. One box of roughly 1.5 sq m, about the size of a small lift. It doesn't sound all that promising, does it? But in the hands (or rather bodies) of Wolfgang Hoffman and Sven Till of Fabrik, who gave us the wonderful Fallen last year, this is one of the most captivating shows in Edinburgh. A small box becomes a whole world. Out of their terrible togetherness and more terrible aloneness, these two men find an accommodation, a strength and a tenderness so acute that watching it develop is like seeing open-heart surgery carried out on stage.

SET up in honour of the late Scottish Ballet founder, the Peter Darrell Choreographic Award offers a helping hand to promising young dance talent. Not through money or medals but through the opportunity to create a new piece for a professional dance company. This year’s winners, Victor Quijada and Beth Cassani took up residency at Scottish Dance Theatre’s Dundee headquarters - and the company’s Fringe production is the result.

Bird's Eye View - The chap who recently spread his hi-tech wings and swooped across the Channel would feel distinctly at home in this piece. For Do Theatre's artistic director, Evgeny Kozlov, has devised a show that is so exquisitely obsessed with flight, you wonder if he is descended from Icarus.

Thinking out of the box Pandora 88, Brahannala, Joe . . . This Infinite Universe reviewed by MARY BRENNAN for The Herald

Pandora, you'll recall, was the minx who opened a mythological box and let mayhem loose. Luckily for mankind, hope chose to stay put. When Wolfgang Hoffmann and Sven Till are discovered, however, squeezed into a door-less cubicle, there seems no room for hope.

Returning to the fringe after award-winning success last year, the Barcelona-based dance company Nats Nus now offer a disquieting solo by artistic director Toni Mira. Loft is about modern living. A man alone tries to open a packet of biscuits and fails. The only light moment in a piece which paces round futility and lonliness like a caged animal, this episode ends with the biscuits shattering around him

Freshmess are fast, likable and homegrown. The company, which brings together dancers from various corners of the Scottish dance community, mixes hip-hop with contemporary style, performing with attitude but turning down the volume just enough for us to appreciate what they are doing. Founded by Allan Irvine, a dance school graduate, the group of five make a happy crew.

SMALL but choice, the Edinburgh Festival’s 2003 dance programme pays homage to the past (Bordeaux Opera Ballet’s tribute to Picasso) but looks to the future (San Francisco Ballet’s triple bill of work by the British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon). On a smaller scale, Cullberg Ballet did the same. The Swedish company kicked off the main festival dance season with a double bill at the Playhouse that showcased artistic directors past and present. Together, the pieces by former Cullberg boss Mats Ek and current head Johan Inger made for an impressive opening.

It's a minute to midnight and 12 people find themselves dressed for a party with nowhere to go. This is the starting point for members of the University of Nevada's Theatre and Dance Departments to put on crazy wigs, false noses, and angst-ridden personnas, and then go into their acting exercises.

It has become almost a Fringe cliché to praise Derevo, the Russian “anti-clowns”, to the skies. But once again, with the beautifully conceived Islands In The Stream, these extraordinary performers take wordless physical theatre to previously unimagined heights. The piece, a dream-like flux of images that drift tantalisingly in and out of view and imprint on the mind for days, has nothing to do with the Dolly Parton/Kenny Rogers song of the same name, but everything to do with the sea, and all who sail on her.

The finest Fringe venue for physical theatre is St Stephen's church, thanks to the Aurora Nova mini-festival there, now in its third year. Its director, Wolfgang Hoffmann, performs as one of two men-in-a box in Pandora 88.

Sitting alone at a table, Toni Mira struggles with a packet of biscuits. He scratches with his fingernails, pulls with his teeth, but still they won’t open. A trivial problem - but when you’re teetering on the edge, it’s enough to push you over. Or in Mira’s case, it’s the catalyst for 60 minutes of self-analysis; the empty stage a psychiatrist’s couch from which he confronts his own solitude.

FOR the first ten minutes of this show, I sat scowling like a po-faced academic, jotting worried little notes about "commodification of a culture" and "ethno-plunder on a grand scale". I was missing the point entirely. An evening of Maori song and dance given the full Vegas treatment (as in Las, not Johnny), this was never intended as a cerebral event.

The excitement in the house was what you might expect before a gig, or a pantomime, and Mika Haka was pretty much situated somewhere between the two. The music veers between chilled Ibiza, breaks and hip- hop, with a smattering of trance and camp classics chucked in for good measure. All this was structured round what I can only assume were originally some pretty sacred routines, before Mika gave them the Stock, Aitken and Waterman treatment.

CHANTIER MUSIL, by France’s Compagnie François Verret, is without doubt the least user-friendly dance production at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. The piece, unusually sober and contained for a multimedia extravaganza, is based on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Musil, as a programme note tells us, is “the most frequently discussed of all underrated authors”. Unfinished at his death in 1942, Musil’s opus offers up a self-examinatory central character who embodies exactly the sort of existential uncertainties that would most appeal to French intellectuals.

Gutteral does not describe the voice that introduces Compagnie François Verret's latest multimedia production. It's a funny-frightening growl several fathoms deeper than that. And dense hardly encompasses the volume of information that follows. There are three dancers scrambling among scaffolding to watch. There's a frenetically scribbling artist and his two screens to keep an eye on, a drummer to divert, a couple of electronic mixer types upstage - and all of it led by an obscurenarration in French (which non-speakers must follow in projected translation) from the man with the throat, company founder François Verret himself.

This festival programme by the Cullberg Ballet marks a changeover in the Swedish company's history: one work by its former director and long-time choreographer Mats Ek, and one by Johan Inger, the incoming director who, although Swedish, has spent most of his career until now with Nederlans Dans Theater.

When Buck, a guy with mob connections and an eye for a quick profit, spots Danny dodging trouble on the streets, he knows he has found the champion boxer he has been looking for. But, with big money riding on huge bets, nothing is above board in the boxing world. And, besides, Danny is more interested in going out dancing with new lover Bella than he is on being light on his feet in the boxing ring. When things turn dirty, will Danny be able to survive into the next round? He could be out for the count unless he can come up with a few good moves.

The dancers of Déjà Donné are deadly serious. Even a little scary. For over an hour they hammer out a relationship triangle and make no concessions to audience comfort. There are aching silences and fierce stares. Simone Sandroni, who could be mistaken for a technician as she stands among a battery of lighting equipment, is motionless for what feels like half the performance. The tension on the stage and the straight-backed pews of St Stephens keep everyone watchful and just a little uncomfortable.

It is the red that remains hooked in your memory; the red of the lady's dress as her body is pressed tightly against the black suit of her man, both swishing beneath the warm, hot, red lights and against a backdrop of rich, dark curtains; the red of Roxanne's passion, her desire, her lust, as she falls into her lover's arms and as they're dancing ecstatically; the red of her master's anger, his uncontrollable jealousy and wild rage.

ONE of the strongest breaths of fresh air on the Fringe in recent years was Wolfgang Hoffmann. Three festivals ago the German dancer assumed artistic directorship of Aurora Nova, an international programme of theatre, dance and innovative artistic hybridity that has positively magnetised the St Stephens venue.

Scrit-scrat. Who's there? It's dark and strange and everything makes a noise . . . well, more of a musical sound. The piano and double bass are familiar instruments. But those plastic drainpipes? Those bottles and rubber hoses? They just look like forgotten rubbish.

Endurance tests A five-hour Korean opera? It may seem like a good idea to some, but it's little wonder the crowds are staying away. By Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian

According to Brian McMaster, who runs the Edinburgh international festival, the average time a tourist stays in the city in August is just over nine days. With that in mind, it's interesting to chart possible paths through the festival: in nine days you could see the entire Ring cycle and the complete Beethoven string quartets. If you stayed an extra week, you could do that, plus, say, Calixto Bieito's Hamlet, the Bordeux Opera Ballet's Picasso and Dance...

Questions and dancers Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews White Cabin and Loft at St Stephen's Church and Chantier-Musil at the Playhouse:

If you're feeling out of sorts, lost the plot, can't find the meaning in life, go to Edinburgh. No need to seek out philosophers and psychoanalysts, when for £6 an hour the choreographers will do it for you, or at least enrage you out of your glumness.

In one day, between the Playhouse and the leading Fringe dance venue, St Stephen's Church, it is possible to see French, Spanish, German and two Russian takes on those great modern dance challenges, "Who am I? Why am I here? Is there any meaning to anything?"

Edinburgh reports: frolicking in the foam Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews Derevo and Fabrik at St Stephen's:

If it was Derevo's capacity for horrifying us with glimpses from the maw of human hell that first grabbed my attention some years ago, now it is the capacity for almost unspeakable beauty on stage - made from very little - that adds to the exceptional appeal of this monkish quartet of shaven-headed Russian mime artists.

Their breathtaking Islands in the Stream is a positive seaside holiday in comparison with last year's home-made Dante circus, with sailors, admirals and bathing beauties instead of demons and lost men.

Tamasha means "commotion" in Hindi and that’s exactly what the theatre company is hoping to create at the Edinburgh International Festival next week.

Their latest production, Strictly Dandia, is a tale of Hindu-Muslim love, billed as a cross between West Side Story and Strictly Ballroom with a Gujerati twist. The setting is the competitive world of the Navratri Festival; nine nights of celebratory dancing in Britain’s widespread Gujerati community.

Tamasha’s artistic directors, Kristine Landon-Smith and Shudha Bhuchar, spent months gathering first person testimony as the raw matter for "a very modern British story". Dandia, a kind of stick dance, is a huge phenomenon all over Britain. Young people turn out at gymnasiums, large halls and leisure centres dressed to the nines: "They plonk this shrine down in the middle and off they go," says Landon-Smith. "It’s ostensibly a very traditional, circular dance."

Never the twain … Festival Theatre: High passions, bare flesh, sectarian tension and hormones running rampant … all in the name of a religious Hindu dance festival. Ellie Carr for The Sunday Herald enters the world of Asian theatre.

It’s a bitterly cold November night on the streets of Wembley. Young girls, dressed in flesh-baring finery, hair lacquered artfully into shape, hang around sizing up the talent as they prepare to dance the night away. It could be any group of teenagers, powering up for an evening of alcopops, hard house beats and furtive gropes. But this lot, British Gujarati youngsters marking the Hindu festival of Navratri – literally, “nine nights” of dancing – are rather more carefully supervised than that.

Revolution: Sex, Dance and Rock'n'Roll One small step away from starting a revolution. Preview by JACKIE MCGLONE

THE powers that be at ScottishPower have to be told about Joel Hanna and Mike Schulster. With their "sex, dance and rock’n’roll" show the two dancers - an Irish dancer and a tap dancer respectively - radiate some serious energy.

Vancouver-born Hanna, the son of an Irish father and a Filipino mother, is small and perfectly formed, with designer stubble, sleek black pony-tail, and size four-and-a-half feet. "I kept growing in other places, though," says the 25-year-old, with a wink.

Schulster, 23, is the perfect contrast to the fiery, black-clad Hanna. An all-American, Schulster’s a New Yorker born and bred. "It was a life of symphony concerts, opera and ballet. My sisters and my mom still ballet dance."

Billed as "an Asian West Side Story meets Strictly Ballroom meets Saturday Night Fever", Strictly Dandia - which rounds off the Edinburgh International Festival's theatre programme - sounds like the stuff of commercial producers' dreams. The fact that it's been devised by British-Asian company Tamasha - responsible for that stage hit-turned-multiplex winner East is East (1996) - only adds to expectations of another cross-over sensation.

Strictly Dandia - King's Theatre, Edinburgh By Alastair Macaulay for The Financial Times

Just beneath the streetwise young British-Asian skin of Strictly Dandia eagerly pumps the silly heart of an predictable can-we- kids-ever-get-this show-on-the-road old Hollywood musical. You're scarcely bothered by the cultural conflict in the plot device that the lovely young Hindu woman Preethi is taking dishy young Muslim Raza as her Dandia dance partner and boyfriend, since Strictly Dandia (written for Tamasha Theatre by Sudha Buchar and Kristine Landon-Smith) cares no more about Hindu/Muslim tensions than it does about the fact that Preethi's dad Ketan is cheating on her mum Prema with his secretary.

Savagely murdered by its own hype, Strictly Dandia is most certainly not what it's drummed up to be. If there were "high passions, bare flesh, sectarian tension and hormones running rampant" in Tamasha Theatre's latest piece of dance-drama, based on the inter-caste boils erupting upon a religious Hindu dance festival, or "garba", they passed me by. Strictly Ballroom meets the world of Asian theatre it is not.

And in case the word "erupts" suggests some sort of spontaneous action, or even surface interest, let's just say that the meagre storyline and skeletal production could have been better devised and scripted by a bunch of teenagers.

There I was, thinking that dance on the Fringe seems to have improved, that is until I found myself watching Blue Is My Colour. This is the daft story of an inept office worker seduced by a mermaid after his boyfriend has been drowned. The puerile text, dreary songs and banal movement are unutterably boring.

Herald Angels: United by their diversity By KEITH BRUCE for The Herald (Glasgow)

THE last batch of Bank of Scotland Herald Angel awards celebrated the diversity that has become their hallmark when they were presented by the chairman of the bank, Sir Dennis Stevenson, at Edinburgh Festival Theatre on Saturday....The strength of the EIF dance programme was again recognised. The work of young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon was given a unique showcase when three works, including a world premiere, were performed by San Francisco Ballet.

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